Thinking about the Ottoman Threat
- sofiapbaker
- Nov 1, 2019
- 1 min read
Among the “theoretical perspectives” that the modern academy expects us to take seriously is what is known as “post-colonial theory”—or “poco theory” in university slang. Like many academic theories claiming to be at the height of fashion and politically radical, it has been around for decades, and the bottoms of its leading practitioners rest on distinguished and well-funded chairs. Nor does poco theory present much novelty in the realm of thought. It blends its cocktail of theory from writers of the 1930s such as Antonio Gramsci, Mao Zedong, and the sesquipedalian sages of the Frankfurt School, then decorates it with brightly colored fruit and paper umbrellas supplied by the cultural Marxists of the 1960s. It argues, or rather asserts, that the experience of non-Western peoples under Western colonial rule can be comprehended in terms of Manichean opposites. Colonialists are the dominant power, imposing a hegemonic discourse of values, monopolizing “agency,” committing “epistemic violence” by suppressing native cultures, and claiming to represent progress and enlightenment while stripping wealth from its victims, who are reduced to slavery. The native peoples dominated by imperialists are the “subaltern”; they can only talk in the language of their masters, their own culture is branded as irrational and barbaric, and they are without agency, incapable of truly autonomous action, forced to be servile, made strangers in their own country, shorn of their wealth and natural resources, lacking even a proper Starbucks. The goal of poco theory is to flip the switch on these polarities, turn on the light, and wake the oppressed from their nightmare of inferiority and powerlessness…